Eggless Spiral Cookies – Pinwheel Cookies

Its the fourth week of BM 26 and the theme this week is quite challenging. Cooking from CookBooks is the chosen theme and Valli made it very challenging by mentioning the categories the recipe can fall into.

I was bent upon clearing my drafts, so that made it even more difficult. So you will find me stretching and fitting recipes into categories they actually may not belong to. Hope Valli doesn’t kick me out of BM for this :D.

Cookies can be fitted into anything. They are crowd pleasers, finger food, nibbling food, appetizer all in one. They maynot serve these in a restaurant, but at home, we serve this lovingly to everyone with a cup of tea.

So for Day 1 of BM 26, under CookBook theme, I have chose all purpose flour. Day 1 recipe is under Finger Food category, I have a party gravy and a dessert coming up in the next two days.

Watch out this space for more recipes. And watch out the Blogging Marathon page for much more recipes from the fello participants.

 

Recipe Source: The Essential Baking Book

Makes  :   4 dozen plus

For assembling, please check out this space.

Ingredients:

• Butter                         :              180g
• Sugar                          :              1 cup (granulated or soft brown, not demarara)
• All purpose flour     :               2 1/4
• Baking powder        :               1 tsp
• Cocoa                        :               1 tbsp
• Egg                            :               1 (replaced with 1/2 tsp baking powder + milk)
• Vanilla Extract        :               1 tsp

Method:

1. Cream butter and sugar with a hand mixer till its light and fluffy. Add vanilla essence and egg, if using. Butter should be at room temp., if its not you can microwave it at 10 sec intervals @ 40 % power. If you do this at full power, the butter will melt.
2. In a separate bowl, whisk the flour, baking powder and salt.
3. Tip this dry ingredients into the butter mix and using a wooden spatula, mix until everything comes together and forms a soft dough.
4. Since I didn’t use the egg, I had to use 1-2 tbsp milk for moisture. You will have to add the milk in tablespoons till the dough comes together.
5. Knead and make a soft dough (dont handle it too much, though).
6. For spiral cookies, you need to divide the dough into two equal parts. Add 1 tbsp cocoa powder to one portion. You can add two teaspoon of instant coffee mix to the other portion, if you want to. I didn’t add it this time.
7. Knead the cocoa into the dough so that its spread uniformly and you have a brown color dough. Divide the cocoa dough and the vanilla dough into two portions again. Now you will have four portions of dough – two cocoa and two plain. I sometimes keep this in the fridge at this point for 5 -10 minutes for the dough to harden a bit.
8. Keep one portion of plain dough in between two butter papers. Using a rolling pin, roll this into rectangle of 2 mm thickness. Take off the top butter paper.
9. Now roll the cocoa dough into the same size as the vanilla dough (use butter paper while rolling, else the dough may stick). Take off the top butter paper.
10. I refrigerate the rolled layers for 10 minutes so that they are easy to handle.
11. Place one layer on top of the other where butter papers are removed. Take off the top butter paper and roll them swiss roll style. Refrigerate for 10 minutes. Repeat for the other set of dough.
12. Slice and bake in a preheated oven for 10 – 15 minutes. The dough can be made ahead and frozen once you make the logs.